Time Management: a Novel

By S.W. Clemens

Jeffrey Porter never wanted to follow in his father's footsteps; he had other plans. Now his father has gone missing, and Jeffrey must return to the mysterious house with two cellars. Soon he finds that to lay claim to the future, he must first reclaim the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.W. Clemens
• Release date: May 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9780996612388

S.W. Clemens

Scott William Clemens has a Masters in English Literature from U.C. Riverside.  During a long career as a newspaper columnist, writer, and magazine editor, he visited 29 countries, tasted more than 100,000 wines, published more that 13,000 wine reviews, and wrote more than 500 articles on wine, food, and travel. His photographs have graced the covers of dozens of magazines and books, and illustrated hundreds of articles. He was the publisher of Epicurean magazine and its successor Epicurean-Traveler.com. For the past decade he has concentrated on fiction, authoring the novels With Artistic License; Time Management, a novel; and Kindle Scout winner Evelyn Marsh.

Book preview

Prologue

Virginia Porter awoke to the cell phone looping a jaunty marimba tune on the nightstand.

I didn’t wake you, did I?

It was her daughter Rosalynn (Rosie), and her voice was chipper, so she knew it couldn’t be bad news. It’s all right; I should be up by now anyway. The clock by the bed read 8:31 a.m. Virginia scrunched the pillow behind her head and glanced to the empty side of the bed. Her husband awoke each morning at 6:00, rain or shine, summer or winter, happily adhering to a self-imposed schedule that hadn’t varied in 40 years. Why are you calling so early?

I was thinking about taking you out to lunch. I have to be down the peninsula for a meeting with our broker at 10:00. I was hoping we could meet at the Stanford Shopping Center.

The center was a high-end mall and Virginia quickly rooted through her memory of restaurants there while calculating the cost. Can we go someplace cheaper?

It’ll be my treat, Rosie said. Unlike her brother Jeffrey, she never worried about the cost, because she’d never had to worry. She’d married an attorney 11 years her senior (her first marriage, his second). In the beginning they’d lived in San Bruno, and as his practice had grown they’d moved north, first to the City, then to Marin County.

I don’t feel comfortable in those places.

There’s a Greek restaurant in downtown Palo Alto — Gyros — casual, not too expensive.

That sounds good.

11:30?

Fine, I’ll see you soon. Love you.

Virginia rolled out of bed and padded across the creaking floorboards to the bathroom. It would be good to get out of the old house. In many ways she felt as though she were living alone; her husband of 44 years had never been much of a conversationalist. There was a nervous industriousness about him that had not flagged in all the years they’d been together. He was always out in the orchards, or fixing some equipment in the barn, or reading farm journals. And lately he’d been taking unannounced walks, disappearing for three or four hours at a stretch.

She showered and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. Randall had made a pot of coffee. She poured herself a cup and added half-and-half and sugar (her daughter had lately been touting the health benefits of agave syrup, but Virginia had never taken advice from her daughter whose passions seemed to change with the seasons).

As a concession to her doctor, who insisted that she lower her cholesterol, she made an omelette with egg whites and low fat mozzarella. Randall had left a coffee cup, a plate of half-eaten toast and the morning paper on the table. That he left his mess for her to clean up struck her as a mark of disrespect, yet her sense of order would not allow her to just leave it be, and she grumbled to herself as she rinsed his plate and cup and put them into the dishwasher, as annoyed with herself for not being able to let it go, as with him for leaving the mess in the first place.

She checked her watch. It was 10:35. She would have to leave no later than 11:00 if she were to meet Rosie by 11:30. So she went to the back door and called toward the barn for her husband. No answer. She walked down the hall to the front porch where she surveyed their property, looking for signs of movement. Ahead of her the land sloped down to the creek and the vineyard on the other side, which spread out to the edge of a housing development built on land they’d once owned. Beyond the houses loomed the dark eastern flanks of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She looked to her left, to the south orchard and again called her husband’s name. No answer. She stepped off the porch and headed around back toward the barn, thinking that he may have gone off on an errand. But his truck was parked next to her car in front of the barn. She searched the barn, even going so far as to climb the ladder to the loft. She called out once again, feeling foolish now, and a bit miffed. This wasn’t the first time he’d wandered off; he’d been making a habit of it lately. It angered her, because it was inconsiderate. It worried her, because it was out of character, and that could signal a couple of scary possibilities — a brain tumor, or early onset Alzheimer’s.

Back in the house she was beginning to feel a whisper of trepidation. He wasn’t so very old, but when a man reached his mid-sixties, there was always the gruesome possibility he could have had a stroke or a heart attack, or he might have taken a bad fall somewhere and was unconscious. And what then? The thought gave rise to competing emotions — fear, as she contemplated how truly lonely her life would be without him, and annoyance that he stubbornly refused to carry a cell phone.

She took a quick look into each room, noting with dismay her husband’s profligate use of electricity. Lights were burning in the office, in the half-bath under the stairs, in the hall and in the dining room, which she now dutifully turned off. In the kitchen she turned off the light over the stove and unplugged the coffee pot, a potential fire hazard if left on all day. She opened the door to the root cellar and peered down the stairs. Another light illuminated the shelves of canned goods below. Ca-ching, ca-ching! she thought. No wonder our electric bill is so high. Randall? she called out one last time. But she could see he wasn’t there and flipped off the light switch.

Then she wrote a note and left it under the saltshaker on the kitchen table.  It was a note her husband was never to read.

PART ONE

Something Missing

Chapter 1

Jeffrey's Problems Exposed

All of Jeffrey’s problems could be summed up in two words: Time Management. There was never enough time to do all he needed to do, let alone wanted to do. If he was deficient — as a son, brother, husband, father, employee, neighbor, friend, citizen, human being — it could all be laid at the feet of poor time management.

Usually he was too busy to think about it, and when he did it was with a real sense of frustration and desperation. No solutions presented themselves. The years tumbled by one after the other, and like Sisyphus he didn’t seem to be getting any further ahead. Sometimes he just wanted to scream.

At the moment this thought occurred to him he was in an airplane at 37,000 feet, hurtling through the sky at something like one mile every seven seconds, on his way home to San Francisco. From this height the horizon curved, the sky above turned a deep cobalt blue, the outside air was 60 degrees below zero and too thin to breathe. Jeff was too frazzled to be aware of any of it. They pack us in like frigging sardines, he thought, flexing his ankles.

Since 9/11, seven years ago this very day, travel had become more inconvenient than ever, with limits on what you could pack and carry on board, and far fewer flights, which resulted in over-booking, over-crowding, and longer delays at the baggage carousel. Or worse — lost luggage, lost time. If the terrorists had accomplished nothing more, he mused, they had spawned the huge bureaucracy of Homeland Security and stolen time from every passenger who was forced to shuffle through interminable security checks. Millions of hours. Billions of hours.

These days he traveled light, cramming all he could into his carry-on luggage. It saved time — 45 minutes, give or take 15 — which was not insignificant at the end of a trip. He always took the window seat so he could turn his attention away from his seat-mate; he dreaded conversing with fellow passengers, as there never seemed to be a polite way to end the conversation and get on with his work. He had spent enough flights listening to people blather on about nothing. This particular idiot was wearing a Rolex. What kind of fool would knowingly spend thousands of dollars for outdated technology? he wondered. After all, a Rolex was just a watch. His own $40 Casio could tell time in two time zones, could work underwater to a depth of 50 meters, had a stop watch, an alarm function, a count down timer, a nightlight, and could store up to 15 phone numbers. That was a timepiece you could count on.

Jeffrey Porter was...what shall we say? — any number of adjectives would suffice. However, the usual convention is to insert a man’s profession here (doctor, lawyer, teacher, accountant), as if that is his defining characteristic. But honestly, by the age of 43 Jeff found himself (through a series of missteps and blunders, through necessity and pragmatic compromise, by roads taken and abandoned) a jack-of-all-trades. Since earning a degree in Visual Communication he’d been a dishwasher, short-order cook, clerk, bookbinder, winery cellar rat, photo-journalist, commercial photographer, travel writer, graphic artist, ad salesman, wine critic, and editor. He had never aspired to anything but photo-journalism; the rest just sort of happened, the way things do.

His current occupation was Managing Editor of Gourmet Traveler, and if his profession were to provide him with a last name (as presumably Porter had provided his ancestor with the family name) he might have been Jeff Wordsmith, Jeff Wineman, Jeff Imagemaker, Jeff Bookbinder, or Jeff Journeyman.

He was on his way home from back-to-back press trips to Grenada and Jamaica. He’d spent the last three days in Jamaica touring the restaurants of posh resorts and floating down a river on a bamboo raft, preceded by three days in Grenada, the Spice Island of the Caribbean, where he’d visited spice plantations, a rum distillery and an artisan chocolate manufacturer. He had seen flying fish and a remarkable double rainbow arching over Port St. George’s. It had been a good trip filled with new experiences and abundant material to fill the pages of the magazine.

As Managing Editor he usually delegated all press trips to freelancers, as his editorial duties left him too little time to indulge in wanderlust: he was too busy coordinating with his publisher, with writers, photographers, advertisers and advertising reps, the graphic artist, copy editor, copy writer, editorial assistant, printer and newsstand distributor. But this last month his publisher had announced that they had a cash flow problem and could not afford to pay the freelance writer and photographer who had been assigned. The press trips, around which advertising had already been sold, could not be postponed, so it fell upon Jeff to both take the photographs and write the articles, in addition to his usual duties.

Over the years he had worked for three other magazines with cash flow problems, and each time the magazine had gone under owing him a boatload of money that he would never see. Nonetheless, the unstable and capricious nature of publishing had led to his acquiring many of the skills that now made him so valuable, if underpaid. Depending on who was on vacation and who had recently been fired or had quit, he was often called on to fill other roles. Such assignments of necessity had never made him much money, but they had expanded his talents and had landed him, for better or for worse, in his current position. And now there were more cash flow problems.

He knew better than to expect a sympathetic ear from anyone; fresh off a luxury tour of the Caribbean it would have seemed petty. It was, as his wife was quick to point out, a First World problem. In any event there was no use complaining about it — most of his friends and family would gladly have traded places with him. What they didn’t understand was that the trips were never relaxing, his other work backed up when he was gone, and upon his return he was under an urgent deadline to turn his impressions into a stellar article that would make both his employer and his hosts happy. And at the end of the year it didn’t put enough money in the bank to justify the hours.

It gnawed at him that his salary was grossly inadequate to support his family, despite the hours he spent working. Carolyn had always made more money, even on her meager high school teacher’s salary, and in the early days when Abby and Jake were toddlers his income had been barely enough to pay for daycare. As it was, they had never put away enough to buy a house. It was all they could do to make payments on a small, two bedroom, two-bath condo in Foster City, on landfill at the edge of San Francisco Bay. At first the kids had slept in a bunk bed, but now that they were older (14 and 11), Jeff had divided their room with a floor to ceiling bookcase, and hung curtains to give a modicum of privacy, though the room still had just one door.

On this return trip he’d spent the day, as he spent far too many days now, both anxious and annoyed. The small turbo-prop from Jamaica had been hot (some problem with the air conditioning), and they’d flown a weaving path around thunderheads, through periods of such intense turbulence that the lady across the aisle had heaved her cookies. She got most of it in the barf bag, but had sprayed the rest across of the back of the facing seat, and the smell kept re-circulating throughout the cabin making a number of passengers queasy and grumpy.

By the time they arrived in Miami, twenty minutes behind schedule, he’d had to sprint to make his connecting flight. Hot and sweaty from his run, he’d strapped himself into his seat with a pervasive sense of being harried and anxious, and nervously picked up the in-flight magazine. Nothing new — he’d already read it in the other direction. For a man with too much to do and not enough time to do it, this was a sardonic moment — he could do nothing until they were in the air, as electronic devices were prohibited until they reached cruising altitude. And he was parched.

Half an hour into the flight the snack and beverage service began (he had a small bottle of Chardonnay with his pretzels). That was followed by the movie (a vapid romantic comedy), and then the meal service, such as it was (service had gone downhill post 9/11, another present from mid-eastern malcontents).

A gin-and-tonic lolled him into a dream-like reverie as the flat-topped bluffs of Monument Valley passed by below. The man next to him leaned over to look out the window.

Can you imagine, the man asked rhetorically, crossing that desert in a horse-drawn wagon?

Hmm, not really, Jeff replied, hoping that was enough to satisfy his seat-mate without inviting further conversation. He fished in his coat pocket and brought out his newest acquisition — an Apple iPhone. Carolyn had gone ballistic when he’d brought it home. It wasn’t just the initial cost, but the additional monthly data fee that annoyed her. But he’d patiently explained how he needed it for his work (the fact that he’d gotten along just fine without it for the preceding 43 years notwithstanding). But it really was a marvelous gadget. He plugged in his earphones and listened to Bill Evans and Stan Getz while he set about sorting through the photographs he’d taken on the trip. He had better cameras, but the iPhone gave him 2 megapixel images, and that was overkill for a print magazine. He’d learned his craft in college using a 35mm Nikon, and for a decade he’d traveled with a camera bag filled with heavy lenses, filters, film canisters, flash and tripod. Now he could carry all he needed in his pocket — no cost for film or developing, no need to bracket exposures.

The new technology allowed him to do so much more. Though whether that was a blessing or a curse was debatable, for now that he could do so much more, so much more was now expected of him. Such amazing leaps had been made in software, not to mention the internet, that it was now possible for one person to do what it had taken a dozen people to do just a decade earlier. Film developers, photo retouchers, color separators, layout artists and typesetters had all gone the way of the Dodo. It could all be done digitally: If forced to, he could resize, filter and touch-up photographs, receive and edit articles, check facts, layout the copy and give the final approval to the printer in Kentucky all by himself. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

But now Gourmet Traveler was having cash flow problems, a clear warning signal, and he couldn’t help but worry. If he were to lose his job once again, they would fall further behind. The bills were relentless: car, mortgage, condo fees, utilities, food, clothing, medical insurance, entertainment, saving for college. Worrying about bills was a burden that sucked the joy out of life. When he was young and daydreaming about a future as a National Geographic photographer, bills had never entered the equation. That, he supposed, was why it was called day dreaming — reality conveniently stepped aside. But the future had a way of becoming the present, and in the present the demands of the moment weighed on his mind. Somewhere along the way he had left the insouciance of youth behind.

He knew he should be happier, particularly when he compared his lot with others he came across in his travels, those limited by health or education, people who could barely afford a pair of shoes, yet many of them seemed perfectly content, if not happy. He remembered a little girl of perhaps four, standing in a clean white dress beside her stick hut in a Yucatan jungle, smiling and waving as their bus bounced and juddered down the narrow dirt track stirring up a cloud of dust. He’d turned to take a photo, too late, but the image was burned into his memory.

Similarly, on Grenada he’d met an unfortunate old woman who seemed, if not happy, at least content with her lot in life. The six visiting journalists had been driven up a winding dirt road, surrounded by dense vegetation, to the Dougalston spice plantation. They’d been escorted into a long, low, grey wood building that had been weathering in the jungle since before the American Revolution. It was a dim room without electricity, lit by an open door and four windows. The warped and dusty floorboards creaked with each step. The guide led them to a table laid out with raw spices: a cinnamon branch, balls of nutmeg, mace, cloves and allspice. As the guide spoke, Jeff looked around the room for a photograph. Sunlight filtered through a cloudy window, lighting a wooden table piled with mace, the spice derived from the lacy red covering of the nutmeg shell. An elderly black woman sat on a worn bench before the table, carefully sorting mace into three piles. Her cotton print dress hung so limply that it must have seen two hundred washings. Her moist eyes were red with irritation. She hummed a tune softly. Jeff disengaged himself from the group and sat beside her on the bench, watching her deft fingers sort bits of mace from the main pile into the three smaller piles.

Hi, I’m Jeff Porter.

Where are you from, Mr. Porter? she asked in reedy old voice, never looking up, nor pausing from her work.

California, San Francisco.

My daughter lives in Miami.

What are the three piles?

Mace. I sort them: Bad, good enough and best.

How can you tell the difference?

Honey, after 50 years I just know.  Her fingers nimbly pushed the curled, dried mace from a watermelon-sized mound to three smaller mounds, one small piece at a time. I got job security; you can’t teach a machine to do this.

Would you mind if I took your picture?

What anybody want with a pi’ture o’ me for?

It’s for a story on spice.

She shrugged. Suit yourself.

He took a few shots of her hands, then of the piles of mace, then a few portraits. She just kept working and humming.

He said, I’ll need a name for the caption.

Delta Duprey, she said and spelled it for him.

Jeff wrote the name in his pocket notebook. It must be hard on your eyes, he observed.

It’s harder now, since I broke my glasses. Can’t afford new ones.

Try these. Jeff handed her his reading glasses (they were just simple magnifiers he’d bought at the drugstore for $10), wondering why her employer didn’t think to give her a new pair. She put them on.

That’s much better. My daughter is going to send me new ones, she said, pausing to hand the glasses back.

Keep them; I’ve got an extra pair in my luggage.

She nodded her head, put the glasses back on, and went back to work with a Mona Lisa smile on her face.

One of the journalists called from the doorway. Jeff, we’re all in the van. Let’s go!

Thanks for the photos, Jeff said.

"Thank you for the glasses," Delta Duprey said.

How could he complain when he compared his lot in life to the Delta Dupreys of the world? He was fortunate on so many levels; yet even as he reminded himself of all that he had to be grateful for, he couldn’t deny the niggling thought that his own wife worked harder than she should have to, that he had achieved less than he should have, that he was a lesser man than he should be.

It all came down to time and how he spent it. If he had more time he could find a better job. If he had more time he could be a more attentive father, a more loving husband, a more helpful son. If he had more time he would get in shape, learn to play the piano, put together the photo essay he’d been planning for at least 15 years. If he had more time...

Jeff was 43 and not getting any younger.

Chapter 2

A Nasty Surprise

Flying east to west Jeff gained three hours, which would bring him into San Francisco at 1 PM. He figured he’d have about two and a half hours before Carolyn and Abby and Jake all came home from their respective schools, time he’d use to go over the day’s emails — queries from freelancers, missives from PR firms hoping to coax editorial space for their clients. And there would be snail mail. Carolyn would’ve already done a preliminary sort, weeding out any mail that might have been of interest to her, but he knew it would still take time to sort through the bills and business correspondence before tossing unread pamphlets, credit card come-ons, charitable requests and mail-order catalogues into the recycling bin. If he had time, he would download, resize and touch-up the photos he’d taken on the trip.

Then it would be time to cook dinner for his family (Carolyn only cooked on rare occasions), followed by his post trip routine of laundry and deciding what to do with the brochures and press materials foisted on him by his erstwhile hosts. It was usually while he was cooking or unpacking that Carolyn would fill him in on the minor crises that had occurred during his absence. And there were always crises. A week was not a long time to be gone, yet on previous trips the washer had broken down, the power company had threatened to turn off the electricity, one or another of them had been ill or injured, the car battery had died. There was always something.

The condo in Foster City was just ten minutes south of the airport, built on landfill at the edge of the bay. Each condo had a boat slip, though few owners actually kept a boat, as flat-bottomed skiffs and kayaks were the only boats capable of navigating the canals at low tide.

He knew something was wrong as soon as he pulled the Silver Subaru into the driveway and punched the button to raise the garage door. As it rolled back on its hinges, he saw Carolyn’s white Honda Civic. She was supposed to be teaching a high school History class. Either she or one of the kids was sick, he surmised, or maybe she’d lost her job. She was in the doorway by the time he shut off the engine, a grim look on her face that did nothing to reassure him. Worst-case scenarios raced through his mind. What is it? he prodded, thinking just give it to me quick.

I didn’t want to leave a note...your mother..., she began, and in that split second Jeff could see his mother in a hospital bed, hooked up to a monitor. Your mother’s been frantic; your father’s disappeared.

Jeff’s mind reeled back from the hospital room and tried to make sense of the last sentence. What? What does that mean — disappeared?

He went missing Monday. She left a message here Tuesday morning, but by then I’d already left for school, so I couldn’t do anything until that night, and it didn’t seem worthwhile to call you to cut short your trip when you’d be home in a day and a half anyway.

I don’t understand. So what does that mean? Did they have an argument or something? A man didn’t just pick up and leave a 44-year marriage without kicking up a little dust on his way out the door.

He knew his mother had been suspicious that something was wrong, ever since she’d taken him aside at his father’s birthday party in August, but he hadn’t taken it seriously. I think you should know, she’d confided, that your father has been acting strangely these past couple of months. He’s become distant, and he’s taken to disappearing for hours at a time; he won’t say where he’s been, just says he’s been out walking.

If it were anyone else, Jeff might have suspected another woman was involved, but at 66-years-old Randall Porter was shaped like a pear, and as wrinkled as a desiccated apple. Who would want him?

I’m worried he may be showing signs of dementia or something, his mother had gone on. He seems preoccupied. And when he’s not out walking, he’s down in the root cellar tinkering with one thing or another for hours on end; I barely see the man. I wish you’d talk to him and find out what he’s up to.

Jeff had rolled his eyes at the thought. Though he loved his father, he had to admit that theirs had been an adversarial relationship ever since high school. Randall valued tradition as much as Jeff valued innovation. Randall hated change as much as Jeff found change invigorating. From Jeff’s point of view, his father was judgmental. From Randall’s point of view, his son lacked the courage to take a moral stance. "Ask Rosie; he’ll talk to her," Jeff had said, referring to his sister, whose eccentricities had never seemed to bother his father.

Rosie can’t draw him out the way you can.

Nonetheless, he’d found nothing amiss when he attempted to sound out his father who took umbrage at the questioning. Are you really interested, or has your mother put you up to this?

She’s worried. She thinks you’ve been acting strange.

"I think she’s losing it," the elder Porter had countered with more than a little annoyance.

The walks...

Oh for God’s sakes — she’s got a bee in her bonnet. I don’t know what her problem is; I walk for my health. What’s wrong with that? I swear — if anyone’s acting strange around here, it’s her.

Had all that been dissembling? Was his father hiding something? Had he wandered off in a haze of dementia? Or had his mother driven him from the house with her incessant worrying?

Carolyn took Jeff in her arms. He felt stiff. It’ll be okay, she whispered in his ear.

He buried his face in her shoulder-length auburn hair and breathed the comforting scent of her. I know; he’ll show up. If nothing else, we can track him by his credit card trail.

That’s just it; that’s why the police are concerned — he didn’t take his car or his wallet; he didn’t take any clothes or suitcases as far as anyone can tell. He just vanished. They’re treating it as a missing-person case. Your mother’s been out of her mind, as you can imagine. Your sister’s been holding down the fort; she needs your help.

She pulled back and looked into his eyes, trying to see how he was taking the news. After 20 years she knew him almost as well as she knew herself, but they’d never experienced a loss before. A death, she thought, for though she would never come right out and say it, she thought it probable that Randall was dead. She was relieved to see worry instead of fear, a calculating mind instead of trembling emotion. They needed to stay focused on what they could do to help.

Jeff called Rosie’s cell phone. She wasn’t encouraging. It’s about time, she answered curtly. I’ve been staying with her during the day, but I have to get back to my kids. Her doctor has her on anti-anxiety pills, which seem to help; she’s sleeping now. I think it’s the first sleep she’s had in days. I don’t know what to do; I’ve got a life; I can’t stay here holding her hand all day; but I don’t want her to wake up and find herself all alone. You gotta get your ass down here.

He’d never liked the bossy way his kid sister talked to him. Give me thirty minutes.

After he’d hung up Carolyn said, I haven’t told the kids; I didn’t want to worry them. When you come back just pretend you’re coming from the airport.

"We’ll have to tell them sometime."

Maybe he’ll be back soon.

It’s been four days.

I know, but we can hope.

A man didn’t just go missing for no reason, and all of the reasons he could think of had bad consequences.

Chapter 3

The House With Two Cellars

The home ranch lay just south of San Jose, nestled in a cul-de-sac formed by an eastern spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The ranch was only 40 minutes from Foster City, and Jeff barely noted the miles as he sped south on 101, his mind a whirl of speculation as he struggled to come to terms with the situation, vacillating between anger and distress, first at the thought that his father may have abandoned his mother, second at the more likely possibility that his father was dead or dying. Perhaps he had wandered off on a mountain trail and broken a leg, fallen down an old well, or been killed by a mountain lion.

On one level Jeff was in crisis mode, calm and detached, focused and intent on taking charge of the situation and doing whatever needed to be done. It was the frame of mind he fell into when rushing to the hospital with one emergency or another, and there had been a number — Abby’s appendicitis, Jake’s cut fingers, Carolyn’s concussion, his own cracked rib (they weren’t an accident prone family, but stuff happens). On a more subliminal level he struggled to come to grips with the possibility that his father was no longer alive, and that the tension that had come to characterize their relationship would never be resolved. He loved his father, but he had a sense that his father was disappointed in him. It was obvious as much from what the elder Porter didn’t say, as from what he did, the subtle looks of disapproval, the sighs, the way he always found some chore to attend to when Jeff came to visit.

Theirs had been a close, though reserved, relationship until Jeff developed his own interests in high school and college. Randall barely said a word about it when Jeff announced, with the brazen disdain of a teenager, that he had no intention of being a farmer, chained to a piece of dirt and living in a creaky old house that was too hot in the summer and too drafty in the winter. No, he had a bigger vision — he would be a National Geographic photographer and travel the world. He would sit in Paris cafés, stroll the cobbled streets of Rome, trek through Patagonia, and dive the Great Barrier Reef. It was a young man’s fantasy, and if it was unrealistic, so be it; he was young and he would have his way.  Randall